Letters to the Editor

Welcome Home Depot

To The Editor:

Re “Home Depot hammering out lease at Hudson Square” (news article, Feb. 3 – 9):

In the late ’60s and early ’70s there were over a half-dozen hardware stores and lumberyards in Soho. They were accompanied by a diverse myriad of discount hardware stores on Canal and Warren Sts. Did the threat of a neighborhood Home Depot 30 years in the future drive them out of business? I doubt it.

Did those business owners possess extreme business acumen, or clairvoyance, and collectively decide to get out of business while the getting was good? I think not. They left because someone either bought out their leases or they sold their buildings and then moved on to different and “greener” pastures.

I like the idea of shopping locally, and up to just a few years ago Hudson Square had a local hardware store, Chelsea Hardware on Charlton St. I knew the owners and most of their staff on a first-name basis and could walk back into their stockroom and search for what I needed without a store clerk interfering. They have since relocated and the building was converted to residential apartments. I now trek to my closest “neighborhood” hardware store, Metropolitan Lumber in Soho, to get my supplies. It’s a little further, but no big deal and it’s still somewhat local.

Although there are some that might say the arrival of a “big-box” store in Hudson Square would be detrimental to the neighborhood’s character, I applaud it. Our family has lived on the far side of Charlton St. since 1973 and watched as the neighborhood emerged from a dimly lit, desolate wasteland (this was years before U.P.S. reopened the former Motor Union terminal) to what is now a mushroom farm of newly constructed condos. What next for the neighborhood, a Costco, a Circuit City? Bring ’em on, I say. By the way, we could use a Staples over here also, as well as a huge supermarket. And a Wal-Mart superstore, perhaps?

The days of the “mom-and-pop store” where the owners live in the back room or upstairs, is a quaint and vanishing institution in this section of Manhattan and most other areas of the city as well. Of course the big-box stores will cause the smaller area stores to shut down. But the reality is that in Hudson Square there are very few small stores, and in fact few stores of any size, to shut down. So what’s the problem?

Those “big boxes” are a lot better for the community than the plethora of red-velvet-roped nightclubs lining Spring St. that lure the “bridge-and-tunnel” late-night crowd. With the addition of increased daylight pedestrian traffic created by the big new stores, other ancillary businesses and services will surely follow.

As Bob Dylan once wrote a long time ago, “… the times they are a’ changin’.” I say, great! The sooner the better.

Lou Scrima

What has he been drinking?